Women take on Der Führer

ANN ROSENBERG

Three six-by-nine-foot colored paintings on canvas from Hinda Avery’s ongoing Scenes from a Resistanze were exhibited at the Cultch Gallery in January this year. The much-larger second-storey level of Chapel Arts (a beautifully renovated and repurposed funeral home at 304 Dunlevy Ave.) is able to accommodate six of Avery’s provocative murals, which aim to redress the Third Reich in shocking and sarcastic ways. The exhibit beguiles viewers to “Come join the Sisterrrz as they take on Der Führer.”

After opening the elegant metal gates and sturdy deco door, viewers are greeted by an exceedingly tall stairway (sorry! no elevators) leading to Drawing # 10. It represents a gaggle of coquettish, aging – but game – burlesque queens. If you are Hitler, or one of his henchmen, each stripper would be happier to shoot you than toss you a brassiere. The thought-balloon messaging takes a poke at Hitler’s thwarted artist ambitions. Avery’s mural is the decadent art he would have mocked and/or destroyed by fire: “Der Führer thinks he’s an art expert – our show will bowl him over completely.”

Avery earned an MFA at the University of British Columbia in 1985, and spent many years as an art instructor. These painted drawings were made after her retirement, but their feminist bias hearkens back to her studies at UBC when she was working towards a PhD. The motivation for the current work came from three trips to Germany and Poland in 2000 to recover traces of her vanished relatives, trips which were in vain.

Avery’s drawings are principally intended as an homage to the imagined bravery of her grandmother and aunt before their probable deaths at Auschwitz. In the initial sketches for this multipart project, these relatives are “joined” by the artist and the artist’s deceased mother who assist them in fighting the Nazis and, later, by other women. Avery’s Resisterrr/Sisterrrz are the feminist superheroes of the comix, sorority gals from hell.

A favorite painting is #7, which depicts happy-faced ladies with very good teeth, perfect coiffures and blouses so freshly laundered that the flowers escape the fabric to surround each woman, Botticelli style, with the aura of spring. Their perfectly ironed Bermuda shorts, running shoes and socks are the practical garb for the phalanx of rifle-toting ladies. They surround a shifty-eyed Hitler in his puke-green trench coat as they run him out of town. Make what you will of his swastika earring.

A close second presents Avery’s expanded, boldly aggressive group of resistance fighters. With grins on their lips, they jovially impede the progress of Nazi cars on an unnamed street. In sports shorts and practical running shoes, the Resisterrr/Sisterrrz are there ready to shoot in the back a Nazi who is attempting to herd Jews to their deaths in a crematorium.

Unlike Spiegelman in Maus I, Avery has felt no need to endow her Third Reich antagonists with the whiskers, fur and fangs of snarling cats. The well-groomed appearances of Hitler and his cronies – their angry scowls, territorial posturing and war-like shouts are sufficient means for distinguishing the typically ill-tempered ganders from the appropriately clothed gaggle of smiling geese they expect to dominate. The fundamental issue becomes, can the elegant brutes pumped with testosterone stand up to the challenge of a group of grinning women with murder on their minds? In Avery’s art, we have a chance to imagine an unusual outcome.

Scenes from a Resistanze is at Chapel Arts until Oct. 13. The gallery is open 7-11 p.m. or by appointment with the artist, who can be reached at 604-222-4491.

Ann Rosenberg is a Vancouver art critic and curator.

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